BIOS update (1.4.4) messed up my laptop

I cant comment on that specific since I dont have any knowledge/insight in nVidia's update policy. But I have come across many treads regarding messed up drivers from nVidia that ends with bluescreens. In fact this was an early problem I had when I updated to a official driverupdate from nVidias download page for my card.

I quote from a forum post on the GEFORCE Community:

Link

I am aware that most people update their Nvidia Drivers from Nvidia’s own download site, since it takes a long time/or never for dell to post those drivers (especially for "older" systems). But when dell now is working on a specific tweaked driver for the AW17R3 I find it more secure to update to that driver package when it comes.
Note that I use my AW for work and not heavy gaming. That is a factor I guess.

 

Honestly, the whole "tweaked drivers from the manufacturer" is an urban myth today...

There are very few "custom designed" GPU implementations that require specific drivers.

When a laptop comes out at first, YES that may be a requirement, but all OEMS (Intel, nVidia, AMD) all roll the "fixes" into their reference driver sets.

The problem is two fold actually. First you have fan-boys that want to score higher than others on even benchmarks, thus they tell people not to update drivers (yeah, childish and petty, yet we see such ignorance all the time, everyday in a TON of stuff in life) because performance "normally" increases.

The second problem is the manufacturers themselves. Primarily nVidia, as it is well known they play with drivers to push newer products. They actually have quite frequently in the past reduced performance in drivers for older hardware to make newer products look even better. After about 3 or 4 generations they usually stop playing games and strip out all the specific "stuff" and everything runs as fast as possible.

Again, I cite GTX480 performance (they actually released drivers to kill those cards) as well as I believe it was the GTX680 or 780 they did the same to. In the far past, they did it to ALL the lower end cards (all in the name of "optimizing the drivers for the latest gen" BS).

But, yeah, there are very few laptops/GPUs that need specific drivers after the initial release.

 

The so called downgrading in drivers has been debunked so many tomes statistically. Its just not true. Please do not push urban which are not true



The 480s died pretty much just of they ran too hot in general. Fermi cards where their hottest cards by a long shot.

 

Rinneh, you obviously do not know what you are talking about.

nVidia is well known to limit driver performance in older devices. Call it not implementing newer optimizations across platorms, call it hobbling older devices, call it flat out "we decided to no longer optimize newer drivers for older devices", but they have in the past not allowed older devices to scale the way newer devices have and then "magically" in newer drivers the older devices (now that they are 3-4 generations old if not older) all of a sudden have way more performance than they were allowed to prior.

As for the GTX480s, they only ran that hot because of all the extra stuff they put in the drivers to slow the cards down. It is amazing that 10 years after they were put out and everyone *****ed and moaned about them running so hot, they run amazingly cooler (especially at idle). I have a pair is SLI that keeps up with a GTX980 on the same games (same system config, same resolution, etc, etc all side-by-side)... Yet a pair of GTX580s don't come close. How is that not playing games with the drivers??? (since when the GTX580 came out it was performing faster than a GTX480, ie, it was drivers)

If anyone has a real clue on GPU subsystem architecture, they would know the GTX480 was so advanced it created real "supercomputing" concerns. Why do you think nVidia released drivers to kill off as many cards as possible about 5 years ago. GTX480s were burning up left and right, all out of warranty. The GTX480 architecture was way more advanced and was meant for much more than *just* video games.

 

Please back it up with data because I just showed you a video where it has been tested and no performance drops where noted. The only drops that could occur where that older cards where for example not optimized for newer technologies. Which is logical.

Its a rumor that has never been proven and mostly based these days on that a 960GTX performed better than a 780TI in project cars. Which was also logical. The 9XX series had a new chroma compression algorithm on which Project Cars leveraged greatly.

The 480 series where piss poor by the way and one of the most unpopular Nvidia cards to date right up there with the Geforce 5 FX series. The 580 was a refinement and kinda saved Fermi.

 

Testing was done on newer platforms. Maybe nVidia changed things, but even per the video it is stated that they are not optimizing drivers for older cards.

AMD does not play those games. Driver improvements scale across all their cards, not just the latest and greatest. nVidia has a long history of only wanting the latest and greatest to get the proper support, and everyone else should feel "lucky" that they get anything for older cards???

Sorry that is just as bad as the way most laptops are treated after the first year or two, or even most motherboards... People need to let the manufacturers know it is unacceptable.

 

Developers often state that the drivers of nvidia are just better outnof the gate. This is also proven in games such as doom where both opengl and vulkan run well while AMD cards degrade heavily when opengl is used. Amd for example never optimized their drivers well for certain api's. Vulkan runs well because it has its roots in mantle which was proprietary AMD tech.

Nvidia also always had strong DX11 performance since day one while amd expected it to be updated earlier to DX12.

I digress, but the general consensus isnthat nvidia drivers are better optimized. And your statements have never been proven.

 

Hi. I'm gathering customers which have been affected by this issue in a facebook group so we can gain visibility and hopefully receive the support we deserve. Feel free to join and share it. I'll keep you updated there on any resolution as soon as possible.

BIOS update fault - Facebook group

 

Hey,
I am having some really frustrating issues with my alienware 15 r2, after scince the BIOS update 1.4.4 from 1.2.8. My laptop is taking up almost 2-3 minutes to boot up (FFELS LIKE ETERNITY) and neither does it shutsdown properly. I have purchased this laptop in last year november 2017. Can you please help me with these issues, Its been 2.5 months that i am facing these issue. And after a lot of tries I am not able to correct it. I am totally freeked out. It will be very nice of you if you help me with this issue. @VICKYGAMEBOY @Vasudev. Please Guys help me out.

 

For your case try to downgrade bios to 1.3.12 and update MEI firmware which is posted in the first page.. try that one.. that should help..

 

But the current version i.e. 1.4.4 is protected. And Ive tried to update the MEI firmware but it was saying that. "This platform is not supported"

 

Try to roll back using this guide, but remember there is always a risk of bricking your motherboard. Up to you if you want to take the risk. I have read somewhere in the forum that a new bios will be out by Sept. I think. You can wait for that or roll back. Also in dell website they have taken down again the bios 1.4.4 which shows they have messed up things for us..

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...3-owners-lounge.797884/page-674#post-10665979

Edit:
and this guide to update intel ME:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...ibly-other-bgas-as-well.813803/#post-10683613

 

You can do BIOS recovery usb drive to revert to 1.3.12 or do full BIOS reset to defaults and see if that fixes the issue.
*OFFICIAL* Alienware 13 R3 Owner's Lounge
I'm using experimental microcode C6 and performance of cpu on full load is disappointing. So I turned off Spectre protection.

 

this i agree, i have a gtx 650 ti , and a 980 on desktop.. i can see how bad the gtx 650ti performs, i have 3 amd cards , and the lowest one R9 270X toxic still performs nice, trust me for such old card its running so smooth, specially amd frametimes are so much better thn nvidia.. but yeah the top end nvidia beats amd for that.. like the gtx 1080ti

 

long boot could be a issue with ur nvme driver.. before that clear ur CMOS one time.. and see if ur NVME temp is getting above 82C.. for me i had this issue, it randomly gets super hot, and the boot times are slow.. even inside windows its super slow.. use HWINFO to monitor ur SSD Temp, if ur temps are fine, check whether ur OS is installed using AHCI or RAID mode on bios.. according to that i can suggest you few native drivers.. last is the BIOS reflash option..

 

So I have been having the same issues as posted here, I have started multiple tickets with Dell (who keep saying a fix is on the way). Then bios 1.6 comes out and I think, "Hey there is finally a fix" but no still the same issues with slow boot and shutdown. I rolled back to 1.3.12 and now it boots up fast but it will not wake from sleep or shutdown, funny though that when the graphics amp is plugged in sleep and shutdown work fine. makes me think that it is some kind of 970m GPU issue. anyways all I want to do is sell this thing but it is pretty worthless when it goes to sleep then you need to hard shut it down to wake it up. I see fixes posted but they look a little sketchy. Any ideas of a fix for what i am describing?